ANON | DOSSIERS | MEDIATOR

dtv.

With an investment of $99 or less (at the time of writing, ie. Summer '99) you should be able to buy a simple digital video camera for your computer which includes a PCI capture card. The one I bought last year is made by 3Com; the bigpicture video phone. You can use this gadget quickly, installing and upgrading the software which includes Asymetrix Digital Video Producer & MS NetMeeting, and you're ready to go. (I would recommend that you browse the homesite of any of the software manufacturers that include their programs, the ones you like that is, that come with the camera to see if there's upgrades or updated drivers, etc.) Another popular camera is the QuickCam from connectix. The following tutorial is as general as I can make it, and is a starter guide in "ultra low-budget" film-making.

With the DVP, you can capture live video, edit and add special effect and save it to disk in an AVI format. To send clips to friends and family or publish to your website, I recommend the free RealProducerG2 which enables a great compression codec (AVI files are massive in size in their "raw" or uncompressed format) and can be played by anyone with RealPlayerG2 (also free) installed on their system.

NetMeeting enables you to teleconference live with anyone also using NetMeeting (and the price, again, is free for now), available from the MicroSoft site.

Steps:

Decide on a camera: look for price, ease of use and capability. For example, can you plug in a standard VHS video camera/player into it? Can it capture 25fps (frames per second) on your system? Do you feel comfortable installing a capture board? (If not, the QuickCam has a plug-in interface that you won't have to "open up" your computer to use)

Once you've installed the hardware (the camera & the capture card) and software, test it. Play with it for a while, familiarizing yourself with the package. Capture some video and learn what you can reasonably expect from the camera/card in terms of quality.

Download updates to your preferred software and the RealProducerG2 (and the RealPlayerG2 if you don't already have it installed on your system) for encoding your DTV experiments if you plan on sharing them over the net or through email.

Start sharing. You can find free "streaming" servers, notably FreeSpeechTV (which has a more thorough tutorial for creating DTV available on-line as well), publish your experiments on your home site, or through email.

A simple and elegant example of ultra-low budget video can be found in TOPY's "Message from thee Temple", a short feature produced sometime in the mid-'80's by Gen & Sleazy, then coverted to a RealPlayerG2 file from the analogue source for your reference. Note: if after clicking the above link, RealPlayerG2 fails to start, save the file to your desktop for offline viewing.

Roika is working presently to produce short digivideo pieces elaborating various interests. Please write if you are interested in collaboration.